Lively, informative, and great fun: the perfect introduction to Odysseus and the society that shaped his exploits.
Synthesizing material from the Iliad, the Odyssey, and other ancient sources, a “biography” of the legendary Greek hero that doubles as a vivid history of Bronze Age customs and beliefs.
Situating Odysseus’ life in the second millennium b.c.e., the author reminds us that this “king” was more like a local chieftain than the monarch of a post-medieval nation-state, and he ruled a rocky island 17 miles long, 4 miles wide. In Ithaca, as in the rest of the ancient world, even the elite lived simply, close to the land. Political relationships were intensely personal, oiled by lavish exchanges of gifts and ironclad rules of hospitality whose violation played a crucial role in the Trojan war and in many acts of Odysseus that seem horrifyingly brutal to modern readers. (The slaughter of Penelope’s suitors, for example.) Beye (Classics Emeritus/CUNY; Ancient Epic Poetry, 1993, etc.) accepts the traditional portrait of his hero as cunning, cold, ruthless, essentially a loner in a society dominated by male friendships—“the protean man,” in other words: “hated by many, respected by most, doubted, suspected, not exactly liked except by women. But then being liked was not one of the concerns of a prince in the Greek Bronze Age.” The author’s lucid chronological narrative of Odysseus’ career is written in witty, deliberately colloquial prose. Only when describing his subject’s sex life does Beye lapse into jarring anachronisms (“Circe was, he dimly realized, the woman of his masturbatory fantasies and his wet dreams finally come true”); in general, his breezy approach helps readers to grasp the nature of long-ago experiences while realizing how very differently these people thought and behaved. Early chapters covering less well-known events in Odysseus’ youth are particularly fascinating, but Beye’s accounts of the Trojan War, the hero’s ten years of wandering, and his return to Ithaca also benefit from the author’s formidable, yet lightly worn, erudition.
Lively, informative, and great fun: the perfect introduction to Odysseus and the society that shaped his exploits.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2004
ISBN: 1-4013-0024-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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